NORMANS AND ANGEVINS
The Normans who conquered England were far more different from the
English whom they conquered than the Danes, under Canute, had been.
And yet Danes and Normans, both being "Northmen," were closely akin.
But we have to note that the conquering Normans came, not from the
north, but from the south from Normandy; and some years of residence
there, among the Franks or French, had changed them. Moreover, we
have to remember that, according to the estimates of historians, only
about one-third of the force with which Duke William came to England
was really Norman. The larger part was of Franks and any others whom
the adventure attracted or whom William had hired to aid him.
The conquest must have made very much more difference to the upper
classes of the English people than to the lower. Many lords were
killed at that Battle of Hastings which decided England's fate. In
their places the conqueror put his own barons and army leaders, thus
rewarding them, at no expense to himself, for their services. Norman
lords soon superseded English lords throughout the land, but the
peasants, and also the townsfolk, would go on with their lives much
as before. The English system was not, as we have seen, so different
from the completely feudal system of France that the lower vassals
would know much difference in the change from one to the other.
{146} The English regarded the land as belonging in the first
instance to the people; the Normans regarded it as belonging to the
king. But in the practical result this different point of view did
not count for much, because the English had already lost all the land
rights which had once been valuable to them. We traced the way in
which that happened a chapter or two back.
It is curious to note how the Norman influence made itself felt
indoors, within the house, more than out-of-doors. The simpler
things, which all would use, kept their old names, the Saxon names.
It is the words denoting things belonging to the more cultured life
that come from the Norman. Thus sheep, oxen, deer, are Saxon names
of the animals which the English would use or hunt; but when these
creatures are cooked and brought to table they appear there under the
French names of _mouton_ or mutton, _bœuf_ or beef, and _venaison_
or venison.
[Sidenote: Game laws]
Mention of the deer and the venison suggests one particular in which
the Norman Conquest probably did restrict the peasants' rights.
There is evidence to show that the Normans were not the inventors of
those game laws which forbade, under cruel penalties, any hunting in
the woodlands. It is certain that this was no new thing of Norman
invention, because there are the Forest Laws, as they are called,
that is to say, laws for the preservation of the game and the timber,
as early as the Saxon Heptarchy. There is also a code of very cruel
game laws attributed to Canute. It has been suggested that this code
was a forgery invented by the Norman kings to excuse the severity of
their game laws. What seems perhaps most probable is that there were
severe laws in existence before the Normans came, but that the
Normans were the first to apply the laws very strictly. The
statements about the numbers of villages and cultivated fields that
William Rufus destroyed in order to make himself a hunting estate in
{147} the New Forest are almost certainly exaggerated misstatements.
We must remember that all the earliest records that we have were
written by monks or other clerics. Now the Church was often at
variance with the lay authority and with the authority of the king.
It was constantly trying to get more and more power into its own
hands. Therefore all the stories are likely to have been written in
a spirit antagonistic to the laity and in favour of the Church and
all the Church's interests.
Just to show you the character of the game laws in those days and
also to show how the law imposed different penalties on different
classes, I will cite one or two sections from the code attributed to
Canute.
"23. If any free or unfree man shall kill any beast of the Forest,
he shall for the first pay double (_i.e._ double of ten shillings),
for the second as much, and the third time shall forfeit as much as
he is worth to the King.
"24. But if either of them by coursing or hunting shall force a
royal beast (which the English call a staggon) to pant and be out of
breath, the freeman shall lose his natural liberty for one year, the
other his for two years; but if a bondman do the like, he shall be
reckoned for an outlaw (what the English call a friendless man).
"25. But if any of them shall kill such a royal beast, the freeman
shall lose his freedom, the other his liberty, and the bondman his
life."
Human life and liberty were cheap, but the value of the King's deer
was high.
I have said that England, by reason of the Norman Conquest, was
caught up into the political affairs of the Continent. This was not
merely because Normandy was a part of that Continent. It was chiefly
because of the relationship or connection by marriage of the {148}
ruler of Normandy, who had now become the ruler of England also, with
the ruler of another part of that country which we now call
France--that is, of Anjou. In order to understand how this happened,
we have to get these troublesome relationships into our mind.
[Illustration: A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD. (A banquet is in progress
upstairs.) (From Wright's _Homes of Other Days_.)]
Hugh Capet, as has been said, was chosen by the nobles of France, out
of their own number, to be king when the family of Charlemagne became
extinct. At first, being as it were but one among the rest of the
nobles, the kings of the Capetian family had little more authority
than one of those nobles.
William I. of Normandy and England was succeeded by William II.,
Rufus, who was shot by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. The
elder son of {149} Rufus, by name Robert, was far away. He had gone
on the first Crusade. Henry, the younger son, seized the English
throne, and married an English wife. They had no son, but they had a
daughter named Matilda. This Matilda then, on the death of her
father Henry I., had this clear and distinct claim to the throne of
England.
[Sidenote: The Crown of England]
But there was also in the world, and ready to take a crown if he
could get one, a certain Stephen, who was the son of a daughter of
William the Conqueror. Stephen therefore, as the Conqueror's
grandson, had a claim to the throne.
The barons of England seem to have given their support now to one and
now to the other of these two claimants, bringing their forces to the
help of the side which, at the moment, was getting the worse of the
struggle. Their idea seems to have been to keep the trouble going in
order to make their own power greater.
At length the whole country wearied of the fighting, and a peace was
made on the following terms: that Stephen should have the Crown
during his life, and that at his death it should go to the son of
Matilda. This son's name was Henry, and he did, in due course,
succeed to the Crown, on Stephen's death, as Henry II.
Now, notice whom Matilda, his mother, had married. She had married
first the Emperor, Henry V., and secondly, the Count of Anjou. Her
son Henry inherited Anjou from her, and married Eleanor, who was
heiress of Aquitaine and Poitou, in the south of France, and was the
divorced wife of the King of France. By his marriage, therefore,
Henry became lord of Aquitaine. Then King Stephen died, and this
same Henry, our Henry II., had England, Normandy, Anjou, and
Aquitaine. That is to say his possessions on the Continent were more
extensive than his English inheritance and also were more extensive
than the lands of the King of France himself.
{150}
Thus was England taken up, as we may say, into the continental system
and became a part of it. She became an actor in the struggles which
such a situation as this was evidently sure to cause between the King
of England, with all these French possessions, and the King of
France. It was a contest between the Capets, the Capetian Kings of
France, and the Angevins, the kings of England who had that name from
the important lordship of Anjou, which belonged to them; and the
contest continued from the middle of the twelfth century almost to
the middle of the thirteenth--say from 1150 to 1240. In the course
of that struggle a very remarkable, and a very remarkably different,
change took place in France and in England in the power of the kings
of the two countries over their barons.
In France the king gradually gained in power until, in the long reign
of Philip Augustus, which stretched over the last twenty years of the
twelfth century and the first twenty-three of the thirteenth, the
king became all-powerful.
In England, on the contrary, where the king had been not nearly so
much in the hands of the barons as the early Capetian kings of France
had been, the barons gained more and more power until, in 1215, we
find King John compelled by his barons to allow his seal to be
affixed to Magna Carta. This charter gave Englishmen the beginnings
of their liberty at the very time when the King of France was
effectually establishing the autocratic power of the Crown over all
French subjects.
Henry II., although his kingdom was so extensive in England and on
the Continent, expanded it yet more widely by a complete and
effective conquest of Ireland, and also by receiving homage from the
King of Scotland, whom his armies had defeated at Alnwick and made
prisoner.
{151}
We have seen very little of Scotland in the course of the great
story, and little of Ireland since we saw the priests of the Irish
Church coming westward and converting the heathen to Christianity.
Scotland had for centuries, from the time of the Romans in Britain
and probably long before that, been a troublesome neighbour to
England on the north boundary. We have seen that boundary shifted
once or twice as the forces on one side or on the other prevailed.
But Scotland, in her attacks upon England, never succeeded in
penetrating very far south, and therefore did not take any very
important part, at that time, in the making of the story. And now
Henry had the Scottish king prisoner and doing homage to him. That
homage gave the King of England the position of feudal lord over the
King of Scotland. But feudal vassals, as we have seen, were not
always quite subservient to their lords. The Scottish kings were no
exception, and they acted very much as if they were no less
independent than before.
[Sidenote: Ireland]
But the conquest of Ireland was different, and complete. Ireland,
lying out in the western sea, had escaped the incursions of the
Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans that had fallen upon England.
Sea-rovers had constantly harried her coasts, as they harried every
coast within reach of their sails and oars, and made some settlements
there; but the island as a whole had not been overrun by any invaders
since the coming of the Celts.
In Ireland, thus cut off from the rest of the world, the Church went
its own way in less dependence on the Pope at Rome than, any other in
all the Western world. In the Eastern Empire and in all the vast
territories of the Slavs the Patriarch at Constantinople was looked
up to as the head of what came, in later days, to be known as the
Greek Church. It conducted its services rather differently from the
Roman Church, {152} and there were some differences in the doctrines
of the two. The Church of Constantinople was too strong for the
Church of Rome to prevail against it in the East, but Rome claimed
universal spiritual authority in the West.
The Pope, moreover, by virtue of a before-mentioned deed signed by
Constantine, and called the Donation, or gift, of Constantine, was
reputed to have authority over all islands. It did not matter that
this famous Donation, or the deed by which it was supposed to be
instituted, was strongly suspected to be a forgery, nor did it matter
that even if it really were drawn up by Constantine and signed by
him, his right to give away authority over "islands" was not quite
clear, although he were the emperor of the world. No matter. This
gift of "islands," though the document, or deed, was doubtful, was
destined to play an important part in the world's story when that
story began to be concerned with the discoveries of new continents
and islands.
For the moment it served to authorise the Pope to give our Henry II.
a mandate to conquer Ireland, and to bring its Church into
subservience to Rome. The Pope was Adrian IV., the first, and the
only, Englishman who ever held that highest spiritual honour. His
behests were willingly and easily obeyed. Ireland, divided between
several local chieftains, or kings, did not resist Henry's armies
long; and so became subjugated to England. And by thus bringing
Ireland into the fold of the Church Henry made some atonement to Rome
for that infamous murder, in Canterbury Cathedral, of the Archbishop
Thomas, sometimes called à Becket, which was done by some of his
knights who thought to give him pleasure by its doing, even if he had
not directly bidden it.
The differences between Henry and his archbishop had risen out of
that question of "investitures," that is of who should have the
appointments to the high {153} offices in the Church (whether those
appointments should be made by the Crown or should be kept in the
hands of the clerical party), which was the cause of much trouble,
and actual fighting, in many lands. The solution of the trouble, as
has been noted already, was found in the arrangement that the Church
should appoint its own officials for all spiritual offices, but that
for its earthly possessions it should do homage to the sovereign of
the country in which they lay. The appointment of the Pope himself
was put into the hands of a College of Cardinals: that is, of high
Church officials.
[Sidenote: Cœur-de-Lion]
Henry's successor on the English throne was his eldest surviving son
Richard, surnamed _Cœur-de-Lion_ for his gallantry in war.
We have come now to the years of which the great story has been told
to us in very picturesque language. It seems to be an age of heroes,
and of heroes inspired by the highest motives. It is the time of
that third Crusade in which the kings of England and of France
combined with the emperor to try to win back Jerusalem from Saladin,
that great Moslem ruler who held Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the
Mediterranean shore of Africa nearly as far west as Tunis. Westward
again African Moslems held the southern half of Spain. There were
gallant actions to be performed on behalf of the Cross both in East
and West.
It was the age of those wandering minstrels the troubadours of the
Langue d'oc in the south of France, the trouvères of the Langue d'oil
in the north of France, the singers of the Lingua di si in Italy.
Each of those was so called from the word used by the people of the
locality for our English word: "yes." In the "oil" we have the
origin of the modern French "oui." In England we have seen that
there were wandering minstrels. In Germany there were the same, by
the name of Minnesingers.
{154}
These Romance languages, as they were called, of the Langue d'oil and
the Langue d'oc, were the result of the mixture, in the different
localities, of the Gothic, or German language with the Roman, the
Latin. The _trouvères_ of Northern France, like the minnesingers and
the English minstrels, were singers or reciters of stories. Sir
Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" may give us an idea of the
tales that they recited. But, at this moment of our story, say the
end of the twelfth century, we are in the midst of the age of
chivalry, as it is called. It was the age when the knight thought it
right to devote all his services to some lady of his love whose
colours--probably a knot of ribbon which she had worn--he carried
conspicuously. It was the age of tournaments, which were encounters
between mounted and heavily armed knights held before some great
lord's castle. It was an age too of constant fighting, some of which
was in the sacred name of the Cross against that Crescent which was
the badge and the sign of the Saracens. So these rhymesters had
plenty of stories for their telling.
There was a whole series of tales about the Court of King Arthur in
Britain, some of which Tennyson has put for us into modern verse in
his "Idylls of the King." There was a series, too, about the Court
of Charlemagne and his paladins, as his knights were called. Many,
indeed most, of the stories, which may have had some historical and
real incident underlying them, were so overlaid with invention that
it is quite impossible to tell where truth leaves off and fiction
begins. The knights are of quite incredible stature and strength,
and the feats they perform are far too good and great to be true.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
{155}
[Illustration: A JOUST BETWEEN KNIGHTS IN THE LISTS]
(From _The History of Everyday Things_ (Quennell), by permission of
Messrs. B. T. Batsford, Ltd.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We ask ourselves, then, seeing that we cannot accept these stories as
true in all their detail, whether or no they are so far true that
they do give us an accurate idea of what life was like in those days:
{156} whether knights-errant--that is to say, knights "erring" or
wandering--really did go about, as they are represented to us,
seeking adventures.
Certainly many of the adventures of which the stories tell us cannot
be believed. The knights slay for us such creatures of fairy-tale as
dragons and the like. But still there is no reason why something of
the kind may not have been true. We have to imagine a country thinly
populated and cultivated only in parts. We have to remember, too,
that these knights, and their horses also, were covered with armour,
so that no weapons of the villeins or men of low degree could hurt
them much. Moreover, the reputation of the knights made them very
bold against the men of less degree, and made those men of humbler
class the more timid and humble. Therefore it is not altogether
beyond belief that there may have been much of this going about from
castle to castle by wandering knights in armour, and the wastes and
woodlands were wild places, where wild beasts and yet wilder outlawed
men might be met with. The tales of the minstrels had some
foundation; but it is probable that what they were interested in was
not so much to tell their audience true stories, as to tell them
stories which should amuse them and thrill them.
That is the kind of story that the singers of England, Germany, and
Northern France told; but the singers of the south of France, the
troubadours of the Langue d'oc, were not so much singers or tellers
of stories, as singers of love songs. They could sing hymns of hate,
too, against those whom they disliked, and this gave several of them
much power. Some were of high rank. They went from castle to
castle, providing entertainment in return for the amusement and
delight which their verses gave. Remember that the castles were
poorly lighted, after dark, that there were few books and few people
able to read what books {157} there were, and you may realise that
the troubadour would be very welcome.
[Sidenote: Troubadours, etc.]
"Troubadour" and "trouvère" are both from the French root which we
still see in French "trouver," "to find." They were finders or
inventors of songs and stories. With them, in their company
sometimes, travelled a lower class of musician and entertainer, who
did conjuring tricks, played antics, as well as performing on musical
instruments. He was called a "joglar," or "jocular," a joking
person. Our modern form of the word is "juggler."
With these shows and performances of the minstrels and the juggler,
and with dancing, wrestling, and cruel sport like bear-baiting and
cock-fighting, the people passed their leisure.
[Illustration: RICHARD CŒUR-DE-LION'S PRISON AT TRIEFELS, RHENISH
BAVARIA.]
Now our King Richard, of the lion-heart, was reckoned as a
troubadour. He was a verse maker and a singer. That Crusade on
which he went with the {158} King of France had a certain measure of
success. It did not gain back Jerusalem from Saladin; but it did win
towns on the coasts of Palestine, and it ended in an arrangement with
Saladin that the Christians should retain these coast towns and that
Christian peaceful pilgrims should be allowed to go to Jerusalem
without being ill-treated.
But the Crusade had other results also. Richard appears to have
taken a more leading part in it than the King of France liked. The
King of France returned from the Crusade before Richard. He found
that Richard's brother, John, had conspired with the English barons
against Richard, and he very gladly gave his aid to John to
strengthen the conspiracy.
Richard, probably taking too much upon himself, in his lion-hearted
way, had offended other people besides the King of France. One of
these was the Duke of Austria. Clearly Richard realised that he was
not a very popular person, for he disguised himself and tried to gain
his way home from the Crusade undetected. But he was found out as he
was going through Austria. He was brought before the Duke and
imprisoned. Later the Duke of Austria handed him over to the
emperor, and he was imprisoned in a castle in Germany.
There, according to the story, he was overheard, singing a song of
his own making, by a youth who had at one time been his page and was
passing by that castle in which he was held prisoner. However that
be, it became known that the King of England, returning from fighting
for the Cross, was being held shamefully a prisoner, and the
indignation of the Pope and of the greater part of Christendom was
fierce. Under threat of being excommunicated from the blessings of
the Church, and on payment of a large ransom, the emperor released
King Richard, who hastened back to England.
{159}
The barons had been conspiring with John, but John had none of the
ability to be leader of a great conspiracy. The barons, moreover,
had learnt from of old how to make their own power greater by aiding
now one claimant to the throne and now another. As soon as Richard
appeared they deserted John's very wrongful cause and went back to
their proper allegiance to Richard. John had no hereditary right to
the Crown, even on Richard's death, for John was the fifth son of
Henry II. and Henry's fourth son had himself a son, and this son, by
all the laws of heredity, had a claim on the Crown before John, his
uncle.
But what we call the laws of heredity were not followed very strictly
in those days, and we have seen again and again how ready a king was
to portion out to his sons parts of his kingdom. It was a practice
which naturally led to fighting and to dissension.
Henry had signified before his death the division that he intended to
make, and his sons began to fight and intrigue for their portions
while he was still alive. Philip, King of France, seems to have been
ready to support any claimant against the King of England. While
Richard was king Philip supported John against him. As soon as John
became king he turned against John, and John crossed the Channel to
fight Philip in order to try to maintain the English sovereignty over
Henry II.'s continental possessions.
[Sidenote: The Plantagenet kings]
But the dukes of the duchies and the counts of the provinces favoured
Philip rather than John. Their quick change from the English to the
French allegiance shows how little real unity there was under a
feudal king. John was a feeble leader, and the result of some months
of fighting was that he surrendered nearly all the territory on the
Continent held by his grandfather. The kings of England ceased to be
Angevins, that is to say ceased to hold the lordship of Anjou. The
name of Plantagenet, from the branch {160} of the _planta genista_,
or broom, which they took for their badge and wore in their caps,
superseded the name of Angevin for their dynasty.
You might think that now, when the French king was thus establishing
himself as lord of nearly all that we call France, the kingdom was
beginning to settle down into much the same condition, and with much
the same boundaries, as we see it. As a matter of fact it had to be
rent apart again, and again re-united, before that settlement could
begin. You will do well to note that one of the most powerful of the
lords who helped Philip in his fight with John was the Duke of
Burgundy. This name of Burgundy was brought into the great story at
a very early date, by a Gothic tribe called the Burgundi coming
westward with the others. It is a name that remains to this day.
But no other name of a territory has stood for such different areas,
or has had such different significance. It was, of course, part of
Charlemagne's Empire, and now it was held as a fief of the King of
France. We shall see Burgundy coming to great power before the
story's end, but for the moment the French king is pre-eminent over
his lords.
The position between king and barons in England is very different,
for the barons are there forcing the king to the acceptance of Magna
Carta. By the provisions of that charter or agreement no Englishman
shall henceforth be imprisoned without trial; and already travelling
justices have been instituted to go through the land and conduct
trials.
In England the foundations are being laid for liberty. On the
Continent the foundations are being laid for that despotic power of
the Crown which is only to be broken by the catastrophe of the French
Revolution.
{161}